There's a young man sitting on a park bench, reading a newspaper. Or at least that is what it looks like to people who pass him by. When you sit next to him you note that he steals quick glances at you from the corner of his eye as he fidgets with the ring on his pinkie.  With each round the ring takes, the paper he is reading slides down a little bit from his fingers.

Jaan takes notice of things like these.

There's an old man who has come to sit in the ladies' compartment of the train this afternoon. He sounds worn out so the women haven't harassed him yet. She cannot see him, only hear him for the train is full. She hears his low laments about life and it's dirty game. She plugs one earphone back in as he grunts about his children and grandchildren. Paying too much could make her tear up.

Women's derrieres make way and introduce her, at once, to his face which has two slits for eyes. Blind and clad in a hand-me-down Opeth T-shirt, he is wiping some of his nose goop on the glass next to his seat. She wonder if his tale has welled him up like it has had her and if it is even possible for tears to escape the lids that look like they're glued together. He gets up shakily and feels his way to the exit door of the now half-empty metro. He nearly falls but one girl with a brown satchel flies from her seat to help him. 

There is a world of difference between that girl. She does something about what she sees while Jaan only take notice things like these.

At the table next to mine, mother and son are sitting together and chatting over warm drinks. It's not polite to overhear conversations like this still they're sitting right here and I can't help it. The child must be around twelve years old and has a Richard Harris like wise look about him. He is discussing his day with his mother with such serious intent, you can see how she could have slipped him a secret or two to him, the kind she would have told her girlfriends, had she still been in touch with them.

He speaks, with certain ease, about how he was unable to sleep the previous night so he got up and decided to get himself a glass of water. He spends a few extra seconds describing how cold the water was and how much he enjoyed drinking it and she is listening, both her hands cupping her chin, amused as though he were talking of his plans of flying to the moon.

I hope that when I have one of my own kids, I can have a relationship like this with them.